The invention relates generally to incoming transmissions for mobile terminals and more particularly to a method and apparatus for managing incoming voice calls, incoming text messages and other mobile terminal activities to facilitate the user's response to those events.
It will be appreciated that mobile terminals may include cellular phones, PCS phones, personal digital assistants, computers with wireless connectivity or the like where the mobile terminal may communicate with other terminals over a wireless network and the public switched telephone network, the internet, private networks or other networking facilities. The wireless terminal may be connected to the network over an air interface using GSM, CDMA, TDMA, GPRS, EDGE, UMTS or other standardized or proprietary transport as is known.
In addition to receiving voice messages it is known that wireless devices may receive and transmit text messages using short message service (SMS) enhanced messaging service (EMS) or multimedia messaging service (MMS). One protocol for transmitting text messages such as e-mail is the wireless application protocol (WAP). 3G offers higher bandwidth services that support applications such as e-mail. 3G is defined in multiple standards including UMTS, W-CDMA and CDMA2000. The invention described herein is useful with any mobile terminal that is capable of receiving voice, text and other multimedia transmissions regardless of the specific technology protocol.
Many wireless terminals include call management systems such as Missed Call lists and Text Message lists. Such lists may be created automatically by the wireless terminal based on recent call events such as incoming voice calls or text messages. It is known to create separate lists where the incoming voice calls or text messages are stored in separate lists based on the mode of the communication. The user must access and monitor the lists independently of one another in order to obtain all incoming transmission data. Because the different types of transmission data are stored and displayed separately it is difficult for the user to systematically respond to the incoming transmissions. Moreover, it is known to record other activities in separate lists such as web browser bookmarks and calendar entries. As a result the user may be required to access and monitor multiple sources to obtain a view of all of the wireless terminal's related activities.